What Would a Person from the Sirdabi Caliphate Know About.....

After considering the nature of the main storyline and the multifarious geographical perils and adventures into which it's likely to fling our intrepid cast of characters, I decided it might be useful to create a whole thread dedicated to helping players know what their characters should know about the world. While anything on the wiki might be known to player characters in the game, some of the information would be common knowledge, while other parts might be very obscure to all but scholars and world explorers. So these posts will attempt to help players navigate the treacherous seas of in-character knowledge!

I may add to these from time to time, so I'm also going to pin this thread so it's easy to find.

The Adelantean Sea and the coastal lands around it make up one of the key regions of Avaria. Even cultures that clash share some common traditions, and maritime commerce ties the entire basin together, including even the furthest-flung regions which few from the caliphate have personally visited, and about which little is known aside from the goods that come out of them. These are some things that people would commonly know about the Adelantean:

• Everyone knows that the Adelantean is a stormy and treacherous sea. Its winds and currents are unpredictable, and bitter storms can come up from the heart of the sea even in the height of summer sailing season.
• Sailing season is Pavana (April) through Kholabi (October). The Festival of Ships, which overlaps with new year's celebrations, begins Pavana 1st in order to celebrate the opening of the season. By mid-fall the Adelantean becomes more difficult to traverse once again, and long-distance voyages usually stop. More localized trips, such as the Greenest Dolphin's journey between Omrazir and al-Sabiyyah, are still carried out but typically only with an experienced captain and crew.
• Not quite at the center of the Adelantean but near it lies the Eye of God, the vast maelstrom that marks the former site of the volcano Mt. Elemnis. For leagues out from the Eye the weather is almost continually stormy, and while violent winds may batter unwary ships in all directions, the maelstrom's currents exert an insidious pull even far out from the center. Few ships that have strayed into this area have ever escaped it.
• People sail around the Adelantean, not across it. Most smaller ships sail just barely within sight of land, and even larger freighters like the Dolphin don't stray too far out. Even keeping a healthy distance from the Eye of God, the currents and weather are too unpredictable, and the safety of land too far off, for anyone to wish to sail through the center of the sea. The only people who ever do venture out near the middle of the Adelantean are the Yehani, the most skilled seafarers of the region. Yehani will sometimes island-hop through the now widely scattered specks of land that dot the Adelantean, and some still make a pilgrimage to the vicinity of sunken Yashalen, though even they don't dare get too close.
• Stories keep alive the old days before the Great Dark, when the Adelantean was a much more temperate sea and its center was filled with pleasant and populated islands like the ancient Yehani homeland of Yashalen. This time was long enough ago now to have taken on the feel of some Golden-Age legend.
• The Sea of Mists is known to exist in the western reaches of the Adelantean, but not everyone has heard of it, and even to those who have it's just a vague and rather eerie story.

Horror of horrors, the Sea of Mists is what the Greenest Dolphin seems to have been flung into by the recent catastrophic storm. People don't know much at all about the Sea of Mists:

• Not really a separate body of water, the Sea of Mists lies in the westernmost region of the Adelantean, where the waters are perpetually shrouded in a mysterious mist. To some people (mostly long-ranging sailors and a few scholars) it's somewhere between a legend and a ghost story. The rest have never even heard of it.
• The Sea of Mists has a fearsome reputation among those few who do know of it, and stories among Adelantean sailors are rife, including: that the Sea of Mists is haunted, that terrible monsters dwell in it, that ships that go into it are only ever found in pieces if at all, or else they come out of the mist empty of their crew, or the crew is still present but mad or soulless.
• A few people know that the mist extends inland at the far western edge of Idiri, at a long promontory called the Cape of Mists. Most people would only know the Cape from a map, though, and few enough would even have seen that. Separated from the rest of the continent by harsh desert mountain terrain, and with little enough to find there even if anyone made it so far, far northwestern Idiri is practically one of the ends of the earth to most people in the caliphate.

Ruvera is the continent lying on the north side of the Adelantean Sea. It's dominated by the Kalentoi Empire, the arch-rivals of the caliphate (though it's been, more or less, sort of generally, peaceful between the two for the last century). Ruvera bumps up against Ruleska on the east, where the Kalentoi city of Calentium serves as a bridge between the two lands. Trade with Ruvera is extensive, often through a series of middlemen.

• The lands and heritages of Ruvera that the people of the caliphate are most familiar with are: Volusia/Cateni, the Kalentoi heartland/Elukoi, and Cadenza/Cateni. These are the coastal lands whose peoples are widespread seafarers, or with whom the caliphate shares a long and contentious history.
• Except for chiefly Elukoi cities like Calentium or Telos, which are grudgingly admired, Ruvera is generally considered a rather barbarous and backwards place, with a rude and rustic population. It is allowed that some of the coastal areas have some small manner of civilization, but the interior is fairly poorly known and the peoples there are, obviously, quite crude.
• The west of Ruvera is thought of as very remote, since it is so difficult to reach ever since the eruption of Mt. Elemnis, the sinking of Yashalen, and the creation of the Eye of God. It is very poorly known, though people are aware of the existence of the barbarian Kingdom of An-Sor at the far end of it, and its quality wool and woolen cloth exports.
• There is extensive maritime trade with Ruveran lands, though Sirdabi-crewed ships are outnumbered by Elukoi, Volusian, and Yehani vessels.
• People of the Sirdabi Caliphate do occasionally travel to Ruvera, especially during times when tensions with the Kalentoi Empire are relatively low. The island city of Telos often serves as neutral ground for people from around the Adelantean basin, as well as a banking center for Adelantean merchants.

This is AWESOME! Thank you!

Agreed - watching this thread in eager anticipation of moar. ❤️

Word has gotten around that the Greenest Dolphin is headed for the port of St. Loomis in the Ruveran kingdom of Ensor, and now a lot of the passengers are probably desperately racking their weary mist-mulched brains to recall what they know of these outlandish places:

• The Ruveran kingdom of Ensor is known to most as "the Kingdom of An-Sor", or, sometimes, "the Barbarian Kingdom of An-Sor". Scholars (and Yehani) would be aware that the name "An-Sor" comes from the Yehani convention for naming the hinterland of their city-states, while ordinary people would just feel it's a familiar naming convention without associating it with anything specific.
• Obviously since it's the "Kingdom" of An-Sor it's known to be a monarchy, but most people are less clear on its exact relationship to the Kalentoi Empire. Generally people of the caliphate tend to assume that every land in Ruvera is part of the Empire and therefore to hold the Empire fully responsible for anything that happens throughout the continent, even though that isn't actually how things work and the situation is far more complicated.
• Most people would have heard of Imbryck and would think of it as THE city of Ensor (surely there aren't more cities in such a far barbaric land??). People with a decent education would know that Imbryck is the country's capital and situated on the River Meander, and might have some vague image of a whole bunch of grungy wooden buildings sitting above the Adelantean.
• Many people would find the idea of ending up in Ensor a little unnerving. It's a long ways away from any kind of real civilization (which more or less ends at Volusia as far as most are concerned), and the vast majority of caliphate citizens have never met anyone from Ensor. It's also generally accepted that Ensor is surrounded by (and in factly partly taken up by) wilderness, so if not quite the ends of the earth it's about as close as you can get and still be on the Adelantean.
• Most people aren't quite sure what language Ensorians speak. Travelers, sailors, and scholars are pretty sure that knowledge of Ruvic is widespread, while ordinary people would just sort of hopefully assume that's probably the case -- it is part of Ruvera after all, and that's what Ruverans speak, right?
• Everyone knows that Ensorians are Kalentians. At least, they probably are, more or less. But they are end-of-the-earth barbarians so probably they don't even do Kalentism properly like civilized people in Calentium would.
• Woolen cloth is the best known export from Ensor. Although not the extremely fine quality of khazi wool or peacock wool, so-called "ansorweave" or "couranty" is an extremely durable and weather-resistant wool that is valued for outerwear. Most people would be a little uncertain what else comes out of Ensor, though there are some other trade goods that flow to the caliphate from there.
• Longtime sailors tend to have known at least one Yehani crew that sails out of St. Loomis or Imbryck, as the Yehani are the locals who typically sail the furthest from Ensor. As a result sailors are usually aware that there's a decent sized population of Yehani along the coast there. Otherwise people in general don't tend to know much about who, exactly, Ensorians are -- just a bunch of pale-ish hairy Ruverans, right?
   

Having mentally compiled everything they know about An-Sor, most people remain much more mystified about this St. Loomis place where they're actually supposed to make landfall:

• Sailors and followers of the Kalentic faith would be the only people from the caliphate really familiar with the existence of St. Loomis, though others might have seen it marked on a map of the Adelantean basin. Besides Yehani crews, there are other mixed crews like that of the Greenest Dolphin that also sail to and from St. Loomis, though only a very few of these ships sail the entire basin and would make it all the way to the coast of northern Idiri.
• Kalentians of the caliphate would know of the town of St. Loomis on account of the actual saint, whose general legend they're familiar with -- he left his homeland to the east of the Kalentoi Empire, joined a monastic order and became a traveling friar and scholar, and did a great deal to increase the numbers of the faithful in Ensor before helping them through the terrible times of the Great Dark. They would know the town of St. Loomis is named for the saint who lived and worked his miracles there, and that St. Loomis is the patron saint of Ensor.
• Caliphate Kalentians would also know of St. Hollyberry, the native Idiri queen and saint who became a disciple of St. Loomis and brought along her entourage to study with and learn from him in the town that now bears his name.
• Because of these traditions, Kalentians all around the Adelantean would have an idea of St. Loomis as a little coastal town in the wilds of An-Sor, sitting along the sea cliffs at the end of the ancient Wayfare traveled by St. Loomis. They would also be aware of the nearby Windhaven monastery just off the coast. Of all people of the caliphate, Kalentians would be the most likely to have an overall positive feeling towards the town and be very curious to see it and meet its people.
• Besides Kalentians themselves, those who happen to be well acquainted with a Kalentian or with their faith, as well as some scholars, would know that there has been some connection between Idiri and St. Loomis in long-ago days, although nobody actually knows what or where St. Hollyberry's home country is.
• Overall Ensor and St. Loomis would feel more familiar and less foreign -- at least in concept -- to a Kalentian, because these places are part of Kalendom just as the communities of Kalentians in the caliphate still feel themselves to be (even if the Kalentians of the caliphate are considered schismatic from the Holy Kalentoi Church due to ancient dogmatic disputes that most ordinary worshipers are no longer really familiar with).

Thank you so much for this information! Would you mind defining for us what a "decent education" translates to in terms of numbers with the Education skill? I just don't want to assume my character has knowledge she wouldn't have and I'm sure other scholar types are equally wary of this :)

I would probably say something like...

Education 1: The very basics of education (basic reading and writing, simple arithmetic, fundamentals of the Song)

Education 2: An ordinary education in an ordinary maktab (i.e., a "decent" education)

Education 3: An education from an exceptional maktab/tutor, or a more ordinary maktab education followed by the beginnings of some higher education at a madrasa

But this is just to give a basic idea of the general level of education that might be assumed at each level of skill investment; it's not to say that this is the exact course by which every character must have achieved a Level 3 amount of knowledge.